1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method, and more particularly to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method which can detect a protruding shape in a three-dimensional model of a living tissue within a body cavity.
2. Description of the Related Art
An endoscope system configured by including an endoscope, a medical image processing apparatus and the like is widely used in a medical field or the like. Specifically, the endoscope system is configured by including, for example, the endoscope configured with an insertion portion which is inserted into a body cavity as a living body, an objective optical system placed at a distal end portion of the insertion portion, and an image pickup portion which picks up an image of inside of the body cavity which has been imaged by the objective optical system and outputs the image as an image pickup signal, and the medical image processing apparatus which performs a process for image-displaying the image of the inside of the body cavity on a monitor or the like as a displaying portion, based on the image pickup signal. Then, based on the image of the inside of the body cavity image-displayed on the monitor or the like as the displaying portion, a user performs observation of, for example, an organ or the like as a subject within the body cavity.
Moreover, the endoscope system including the above described configuration can also pick up an image of a mucosa of the gut such as a large intestine, for example, as the subject within the body cavity. Thus, the user can comprehensively perform various observations of a color tone of the mucosa, a shape of a lesion, a microstructure of a mucous surface, for example.
Furthermore, in recent years, it is possible to generate a three-dimensional model of the subject based on two-dimensional image data depending on the image pickup signal of the image of the subject picked up by the endoscope. For example, an endoscope apparatus as described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 11-337845 has been proposed.
On the other hand, as a method of detecting a lesion area such as a polyp in the three-dimensional model, for example, a method described in US Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0223627 has been proposed in which the lesion area in the three-dimensional model can be detected by performing evaluation of a shape of the three-dimensional model while using shape feature values based on curvatures such as ShapeIndex and Curvedness.